Father to many

Two careers, happy marriage, eight children, 23 grandchildren, loads of friends — by age 60, Josef Vollmer-König seemed to have it all.

Then his life, as we know it, began.

Story by Christina Hughes Babb | Photo by Hillary Schleier

In the 1940s Josef Vollmer-König and his family lived a week in a forest, avoiding Allied forces after World War II. A child, he knew nothing about the war, except that the thing “bombed out” his school, a tiny one-classroom structure in the middle of the small German town where his father owned a sprawling farm.

Vollmer-König — now in his 80s and serving as the pastor at St. Patrick’s in Lake Highlands — shares photographs of his hometown that he shot with his iPhone 5 on a recent visit. The crisp little image does justice to the expansive green prairies interrupted only by a few quaint farmhouses and old towering trees — against a shadowy, mountainous backdrop. The Catholic church was the only church in town. Everyone in town was Catholic, Vollmer-König confirms. War ended and as time passed, life — for his family, at least — started its journey back to normal. The town was rebuilt and young

Josef learned to cook, became a skilled chef and got a job in a restaurant. He was a good kid, but one itching for adventure. Doesn’t every young person have the itch? Vollmer-König says he thinks so.

He came to the United States to work as a chef in San Antonio, Texas. “I went because I wanted to see the world,” he says. “I planned to stay for a year.” He had a few problems in America, not the least of which was that, at the time, he spoke little English and no Spanish (a hindrance in a Texas kitchen, he learned).

The cooks would good-naturedly tease him and lie to him about the meaning of words. The only one who helped him was a pretty waitress named Ernestine. It did not take long for Josef to fall for Ernestine and she for him. They married in ’61. He joined the Army and remained in the reserves for 25 years. They started a family, which eventually included eight children.

But a sort of revolution — he calls it the “hamburger revolution” of 1966 — would shift the tide for the Vollmer-Königs.

“When cars became popular, drive-ins and drive-thrus and car hops became popular. A chef couldn’t take care of his family anymore. So I decided to change professions.”

He went to machinist school and took a job at General Motors in Dallas, where he worked for 30 years. Around their Oak Cliff neighborhood, Josef was known as the guy with all the kids. “I was the man with the five girls, because my wife didn’t feel like taking them all over the place with her, so I often kept [the girls] with me.”

Josef became a deacon at Blessed Sacrament Church in Oak Cliff; he visited and delivered communion to retirement and nursing homes. This is what he loved to do, he says. Help the hurting and ailing, participate in the Catholic tradition, sing with the choir. Whether in Germany, Rome or Dallas, the Catholic mass was always understandable each calendar day the mass is rooted in the same Biblical scripture at every Catholic church in the world.

He introduced the art of making gingerbread houses, a remnant of his culinary past, to his offspring and his neighbors. A clipping from a 1969 newspaper shows Josef with one of his prizewinning gingerbread houses. He has a white apron inscribed with “The Gingerbread Man” that he says he bought from a tailor shop two blocks away from the Vatican in Rome.

By the early ’90s, he had a slew of grand-